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advocate that multiple methods be brought to bear on this area of research. A review by Deng, Chen, Tsai and Chai
(2011) of research on scientific epistemology has illustrated how multiple methods illuminate different aspects of
students’ beliefs. It is therefore necessary to design questionnaire to survey general epistemic outlooks especially on
the aspects of individual’s view about design thinking and knowledge as human construction or viable improvable
ideas. In addition, interviewing all levels of knowledge creators would help to piece the puzzle together. However,
instead of beginning research of design epistemology with what people say or believe in, we would suggest that a
better foundation to build understanding about personal epistemology is on what people do during the act of
constructing knowledge through the design mode of thinking. In other words, we argue that researching individual
epistemic repertoire should begin with how they are enacted.
Work by Hammer and Elby (2002) on epistemological resources could give us a more concrete handle in terms of
what epistemological repertoire consists in and how it can be investigated. Epistemological resources are regarded
as fine-grained knowledge elements possessed by a student, which can be activated by different contexts (see also pprim
theory by diSessa (1993), that is, they are by nature World 2 elements stored in the mind of the students.
Hammer and Elby propose four categories of epistemological resources:
• The general nature of knowledge and how it originates (e.g., knowledge as propagated stuff; knowledge as
constructed, knowledge as fabricated…)
• Resources for understanding epistemological activities and forms (e.g., brain-storming, building or making to
think, and lists)
• Epistemic games and epistemic forms (we would also include modeling, or prototyping)
• Resources for understanding stances one may take towards knowledge (e.g., doubting and accepting)
In classroom situations, depending on how the pedagogical intentions are framed epistemologically by the teachers,
students discursively activate various aspects of his or her epistemological resources to deal with the problems at
hand. Elby and Hammer (2010) view the activation of as locally coherent (e.g., sometimes across contexts) rather
than haphazard and incoherent. In addition, they proposed students’ “development as a progressive construction of
patterns of resource activation” (p. 413). However, the contextually activated resources may not be appropriate to the
epistemic task at hand and this would hamper students’ effort or distort the teachers’ epistemic framing of the task
(see for example, Rosenberg, Hammer, & Phelan, 2006). In other words, students may activate inappropriate World
2 or World 1 objects to work on a World 3 object, or vice versa. A teacher’s job would then be to reframe students’
effort through epistemic scaffold. Beyond such one-to-one epistemic scaffolding, it is clear that teachers need to
shape and reshape the epistemic climate of the class, represent subject matter as World 3 objects to be improved
upon; steer the metacognition of the class towards coordinating multiple perspectives for idea improvement and
engage students in using appropriate ICT tools to support the complex problem solving processes.
Assuming that the teacher could successfully achieve the above, what, how and why students’ epistemic repertoire
are formed and changed would be of great interest to researchers. However, as portrayed in Figure 1, to study
students’ epistemic repertoire in isolation is to confine it to World 2 exclusively. This is likely to distort
understanding rather than unpack the emergence of epistemic repertoire. We therefore suggest that regardless of the
researcher’s approach to the study of design epistemology, sufficient characterization of the World 1 and the World 3
is also necessary.
Conclusion
In this paper, we argue for design epistemology, an extension of personal epistemology, as the epistemological basis
for educational reform to prepare our students for the Knowledge society. We elaborate the construct of design
thinking and its roles in knowledge creation from two key perspectives: Nigel Cross’s design realm of knowledge
and its relation to science and humanities realm of knowledge, and Popper’s three ontological worlds of objects.
Educational technologies, we suggest, play an important role in supporting knowledge creation by reifying
conceptual artifacts, tracking historical development of conceptual artifacts, and juxtaposing these artifacts for
creation of new artifacts. Most importantly, we argue that in this Knowledge Age, developing students’ epistemic
repertoires, or ways of knowing, should be the key educational reform effort and research agenda.
Moving forward, we propose a few key research agenda and directions anchored on design epistemology. Our
arguments, we hope, serve as World 3 objects that could trigger further discussion and research effort for the benefit
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